That’s a cynical tale, but once you realize that profit is a useful way to signal to technologists what the world finds useful in aggregate, it means there is more likelihood that the science gets out of the lab to the real world.

tldr; for good or bad, humanity hasn’t found an incentive mechanism better than capitalism for deploying tech at scale.

Isn't this one of those game theory scenarios? Some labs could profit by not announcing replication, but others could by announcing it as quickly as possible? Thus not all labs will behave the same way, unless they are all colluding which seems unlikely.